Tuesday, 15 April 2014

Winter Is Coming

So I've just been playing around with a few things, mainly trying to keep my skills polished before I start my new job.

Ribbons are a really powerful tool that I've quite neglected. I figured a good exercise to learn a bit more about them would be with weapon trails. Here's just a quick bash at a sword trail. I'm thinking I might do more work with ribbons following a set of particles, kind of like how they use them in Infamous Second Son, but I've got plenty of things on my plate so who knows.

I've also been keeping myself busy with weather effects. I've not done a whole lot of ambient effects so it was good practice. I was trying out a couple of techniques to imitate the way the wind whips up the snow along the top. In this first video I use the same sprites as I do in the snow storm.

But with this one I tried a material more like a ribbon than a sprite. I think they both yield good results, it's just a matter of preference on the style.

And this was just because I thought that the material I made for the snow storm worked quite well as a dry ice effect.